Pages

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

A year ago, I get an idea for an app that I
believe can help improve parents' life by making it easier for them to connect with old friends and make new ones. I named it Menura and as I started working on it, I
wanted to learn about the process of starting a new business and building a
network. So I attended some events in Copenhagen, where I live, and I met some
great people. One of them is David Helgason, the founder and former CEO
of Unity. We talked about best practices when starting and the best resources to
learn from. We mentioned reading books, meeting people among some other things,
but the one thing he highly recommended was that I go and listen to the "How to start a startup" lectures by Sam Altman,
the president of Y-Combinators, and so I did.

The series contain 20 lectures of about 45 min
length each and were presented initially at Stanford University in 2014. Sam brought
together a great group of experienced and successful people to talk and share
lessons from their own experience starting (now some million worth) startups.
Speakers include for instance, Peter Thiel, known as the co-founder of
PayPal, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, Aaron Levie, co-founder of
Box, Ben Silbermann, co-founder and CEO of Pinterest, and Paul Graham, the
co-founder of Y-Combinators.

I listened to the lectures while Menura was in
its early stages, and I enjoyed and learned a lot from everyone of them. But
now that I'm almost done with the development phase that I need to execute the
following steps, I feel like I don't recall many of the details in the
lectures. So I decided to listen to them once more but this time, I decided to
take notes of the important points to keep them as a reference for the future.
I will be sharing my notes so anyone interested can benefit from them. Note
however, that these are my personal notes which mean they are subjective and
you might end up focusing on other ideas if you listen to the lectures yourself
(which I highly recommend). Nevertheless, I think they are interesting and
worth sharing.

Without further due, let's get started!

Lecture 1: How to Start a Startup

To start a successful startup, you need to excel
in four main areas:

1.Idea:

oExecution is harder and 10 times more important

oBad ideas are still bad (even with great execution)

oThink long term

oShould be difficult to replicate

oNeeds critical evaluation that includes

§Market: size, growth

§Company: growth strategy

§...

2.Product

3.Team

4.Execution

Where success = idea * product * team *
execution * (w* luck)

where w is a number in the
range [0,10000] and what is nice about it is that it is somehow controllable
:).

Starting a startup is really hard:

1.Do not do it to become rich
(there are easier ways)

2.Do it if you have a
solution to a problem

3.Ideas first and startup
second

4.The good idea is the one
you think about frequently when not working

You should focus on a mission-oriented
startup:

You are committed = you love what
you are doing

You have a great patience:
startups take about 10 years

Good ideas are unpopular but right:

You can practice identifying them

They look terrible at the beginning

Start with a small market to
create a monopoly and then expand

You will sound crazy but be right

Look for an evolving market (big
in 10 years)

The market is better when it is
small and growing rapidly, it means the market is more tolerant and hungry
for a solution

You can change everything but the
market

Answer why now?

To build something you yourself
need is better to understand the problem

The idea should be explainable in
one sentence

Think about the market (what
people want) first

Good practice:

Be confident

Stay away from nay-sayers (most
people if it is a good idea)

Good Product is something users love:

Until you build it, nothing else
matter

Spend your time building and
talking to customers

Marketing is easy when you have a
great product

Better to build something a small
number of users love than to build something a large
number of users like. Easy to expand from there

Find a small set of users and make
them love what you are doing.

Build a product that is so good
that it will grow by the word-of-mouth

Most companies dies because they
didn't make something users love, not because of competition

Start with something simple (I
like what Leonardo Da Vinci said about this "simplicity is the
ultimate sophistication" and Steve Jobs' famous quote "Simple
can be harder than complex")

Quality and small details matter

Be there for your customers (even
at midnight)

Recruit feedback users by hand
(this is the stage where I am at with Menura right now and I can't tell
you how hard it is, you should literally send personal emails and messages
to every single one of you potential interested users and you should keep
the conversation going.)

Do not do ads to get initial
users, you don't need many, you need committed ones

Loop from feedback to product
decisions by asking the users:

What they like/dislike

would they recommend it to others

have they recommend it already

what features would they pay for

Make the feedback loop as tight as
possible for rapid progress

Do it yourself (that includes
everything, from development to marketing to customer support...)

Startups are build on growth, so
monitor it

If this (your product) is not
right, nothing else will matter

Discussion about team and execution is left to
the next lecture and we will now move on to answer the most important question
(in my opinion): why you should start a startup?

Why you should start a startup?

Probably you thought about it as being Glamorous
(you will be the boss, it has attractive flexibility, you will be making impact
and $$). In reality, however, it is a lot of hard work and it is pretty
stressful. Here is why:

You will be:

1.having a lot of
responsibility

2.always on call

3.taking care of fundraising

4.gathering media attention
(not always what you like to see)

5.strongly committed

6.managing your own
psychology

And here is a more elaborate explanation of what
you might think is attractive about it:

1.Being the boss: not really
true (you will be listening and executing everyone else needs and feedback)

2.Flexibility: also not true
as you will be always on call, you are the role model, you are always
working

3.Having more impact and more
$$: you might actually make more money joining Facebook or Dropbox, and you get
to work with a team so you might end up making more impact

After some thought provoking points, it is now
time to find out the real reason you should have to start your own startup. It
is actually pretty obvious: you simply

"can't not do it"

This means:

1.You are passionate about it

2.You are the right person

3.You gotta make it happen

4.You can't stop working on
it

5.You will force yourself
into the world to achieve your vision

Pretty nice and thoughtful introduction. Now
that was the end of the first lecture and the finishing slide was
recommendations for some book.

I have personally started reading Zero to One
I'm really enjoying it (the rest are on my reading list, which is growing very
fast :)). I will probably share some summaries about in another blog, but
that's it for now.

Main takeaways:

(These are the main points that stick into my mind
after listening to the whole lecture)

1.Ideas are important but
execution is vital

2.Make something people love

3.A small number of people
loving your product is more important than a large number liking it

4.Get your product right and
everything else will follow smoothly from there

5.Build your own
product-lover small community and rely on the power of WoM

6.If starting a startup is
the thing you can't do without, then you are on the right track (good luck,
enjoy the journey!). Otherwise, join one of the great companies.